Henry Plumb, Lord Plumb, who has died aged 97, was the only Briton to have been elected president of the European parliament. He held office from January 1987 until July 1989.
Plumb owed his victory largely to the last-minute support of the Irish MEPs, who appreciated his farming background and generally conciliatory approach, which they considered unusual in a British Conservative, and to the abstention and in some cases support of the French far right under Jean-Marie Le Pen. But Plumb was elected president above all because people across the House liked and trusted him. The bluff, affable, ruddy-cheeked exterior hid a canny pragmatist strongly committed to building bridges in the general interest, and to the European project.
It had been quite a journey for the boy who left school at the age of 15 to help on his father’s farm in Coleshill, Warwickshire, during the second world war. He was the son of Charles and Louise Plumb, educated at King Edward VI school, Nuneaton, and took over the running of the farm and the raising of its herd of dairy cattle after his father’s death in 1952. Plumb gradually progressed through the senior ranks of the National Farmers’ Union to become its president in 1970 and the chair of Copa – the European Association of Agricultural Producers.
Elected Conservative MEP for the Cotswolds in the first direct elections in 1979, he quickly made his mark in the European parliament, first becoming chairman of the agriculture committee (in those days one of the most influential), scrutinising the management of the common agricultural policy at a time of European “butter mountains” and “wine lakes”, and then leader of the group of British Conservatives.
As president he was responsible for overseeing all the business of the parliament – holding regular meetings with the president of the European Commission and prime ministers of member states, ensuring the smooth running of its committees, and overseeing voting sessions in the chamber.
His time in office coincided with a significant extension of the parliament’s competences and powers, with the entry into force of the Single European Act, the first major revision of the Treaty of Rome.
Its call for the creation of a single market by 1992, accompanied by a reform of the community’s legislative process with the introduction of cooperation and assent procedures, meant that, from then on, the parliament’s role was to become much more than consultative and would develop into that of co-legislator.
On 29 June 1987 he became the first president of the European parliament to address the European Council (the body bringing together prime ministers and heads of state), a tradition that has continued ever since. His main theme was the need for the three institutions – parliament, commission and council – to work together to prepare for the launch of the single market.
Another first of the Plumb presidency was the creation in 1988 of the Sakharov prize for freedom of thought, following an initial proposal by the British Conservative MEP Nicholas Bethell. The first winners were jointly Nelson Mandela and Anatoly Marchenko, the Soviet author and dissident.
In terms of media coverage of Plumb’s presidency, one incident surpassed all others – when he expelled the Democratic Unionist MEP Ian Paisley from the chamber during the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1988. After Paisley held up a poster denouncing the pope while shouting: “I refuse you as Christ’s enemy and antichrist with all your false doctrine”, he was quickly and summarily bundled out of the chamber by security staff. The pope remained unperturbed.
Paisley claimed after the event that he had been grievously mishandled and that Plumb should have never allowed a vicious attack on a member of parliament exercising his right to free speech. In fact the reaction to Paisley’s rant and his ejection had been carefully planned in advance and stage-managed by Plumb’s cabinet, moreover with the Vatican’s full agreement.
Shortly before the end of his mandate, as something of a swansong, in February 1989 Plumb visited Argentina, with the discreet blessing of the UK foreign secretary Geoffrey Howe. There he met with the president, Raúl Alfonsín, in Buenos Aires. He was the first British politician to meet the Argentine authorities since the Falklands war seven years previously, and diplomatic relations were still suspended, with all communications having to go through the Swiss consulate.
After thanking the European parliament for its support for human rights in Argentina and Latin America generally, Alfonsín then appealed for help from the EU and the European parliament, asking Europe “to show generosity of spirit” to help tackle Argentina’s grave economic problems and crippling levels of debt. Although it was still too early to discuss questions of sovereignty over the Falklands, surely the two sides could start by sitting round a table to discuss economic and trade issues?
Plumb replied that perhaps the European parliament could be the vehicle to make that happen, and he would convey Alfonsín’s message to Brussels and London. As it turned out, almost exactly a year later, diplomatic relations between Britain and Argentina were re-established.
By that time Plumb had been succeeded as president of parliament. As he made his way out of the chamber for the last time as president, MEPs lined up to offer their thanks and congratulations to “Henry” in various languages. Proudly calling himself “semibilingual”, Plumb did not understand all the words but got the gist, and smiled broadly.
He had been knighted in 1973 and raised to the peerage in 1987. He continued to serve as an MEP until 1999 and thereafter, until his retirement in 2017, he actively pursued his two main interests of farming and Europe in the Lords.
His wife Marjorie (nee Dunn), whom he married in 1947, died in 2019, and his daughter Elizabeth also predeceased him. He is survived by two children, John and Christine.
• Charles Henry Plumb, Lord Plumb, farmer and politician, born 27 March 1925; died 15 April 2022
